Startup Systems
Britt Gage added 1y ago
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
There is a whole lot of goodness out there when the right systems are in place.
Britt Gage added 10mo ago
- if the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) gains traction, then the company will likely receive funding and a growth period will occur. Invariably, that means more people will join the team and the vision from the initial engineer needs to be shared.
Early on, when the team is small (2–15 people), typically processes are loose as the overhead in aligning o... See morefrom Evolution of Monolithic Systems
Britt Gage added 5mo ago
from Superhuman
Britt Gage added 9mo ago
Britt Gage added 9mo ago
Burnout cultures exhaust us through the week and force us to recharge during our time off. Healthy cultures provide daily space to refuel. - Adam Grant
- 17% of employees who quit do it within the first month of a new role.
Why?
They were sold on something different than what they received once they got started.
Startups move fast and sometimes it’s unavoidable, but when this happens there’s a huge loss of trust. Employees may never take you at your word again fully.
The best you can do is to be can... See morefrom What Do Top 1% Startup Employees Want? by Michael Houck
Britt Gage added 9mo ago
- The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.
from The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
Britt Gage added 9mo ago
- Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.
When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is techno... See morefrom Systems Thinking vs Design Thinking, What’s the Difference?
Britt Gage added 9mo ago
- Angles that spread usually check the following boxes:
- Surprising — presents unexpected new information or theories
- True — we actually believe it
- Important — has an impact on our behavior
- Relevant — related to domains we care about
- Cool — we think we’ll look impressive for sharing it
from How to Write Essays That Spread by Nathan Baschez
Britt Gage added 10mo ago
- There are endless tasks to be done in starting a new venture. But most of the tasks are necessary but insufficient. You can’t begin without them, but by themselves, they won’t create enough impact for your work to make a change happen.
And every new project must create change, or else it fails.
We spend our time focusing on the tasks because the task... See morefrom Customer traction is the hard part
Britt Gage added 9mo ago